Cold Dish (41 page)

She looked a little worried. “I thought you might want something to eat?”

“Bless you.”

She looked around and then back down to me. “Are you okay?”

“Just thinking.” I reached over and picked up my hat where it had fallen during my dramatic interpretation. I looked at the flowers, still clutched in my other hand. “You want some flowers?”

“No, thanks.”

I pushed up and slid over to the wall as she handed a tray down to me. It was some sort of supposed egg matter that I’m sure had never seen the rear end of a chicken and two grayish meat patties that had never oinked. I placed my hat beside me with the brim up and placed the flowers in it. I rested the tray on my lap and picked up a piece of dry toast and began chewing. No wonder so many people died here, they starved to death. Whatever this was, it was not the usual. “Janine, is there a shower around here?”

She blinked. I guess it was a strange request. “There’s the one in the staff locker room.”

“Would anybody mind if I used it?”

“I don’t think so; you’re kind of a local hero.”

I continued chewing my toast and began wondering if it was real bread. “Why’s that?”

“Because of what you did up there.”

Everybody talked about the mountains as if they were on the second floor. I was uncomfortable with flattery, so I asked her how the Cheyenne Nation was doing. She said that he had turned out to be remarkably resilient and was lucky in that the bullet hadn’t done any serious damage to any of his solid organs. While the doctors were in there, they had taken his appendix. I asked about his index but didn’t get a laugh, at least not from Janine, as a sultry giggling erupted again from room 62. We looked at each other as I continued chewing my toast, and her face reddened. “Well, it’s good to know all his solid organs are functioning properly.”

Janine made a hasty retreat down the hallway. A few moments later, Dena Many Camps came through Henry’s door. She straightened the same fringed dress I had seen her in a few days earlier and fine-tuned the lipstick at the corner of her open mouth with the tip of a middle finger. She froze for an instant when she saw me. I pulled a beaten tiger lily from my hat and held it up to her. She smiled and took it, bestowing a ravishing wink back over her shoulder as she sashayed down the hall and turned the corner.

I figured that about a dime’s worth of Dena Many Camps and a Fresca would kill my ass.

“What do you mean he’s gone?” George Esper was, once again, at large. I dried off my damp hair, made sure the towel around my middle was secure, and sat beside my set of new clothes that were still in the green paper shopping bag from the Sportshop.

Ferg looked like he was going to die. “He said he wanted something to eat, so I went to get a nurse . . .”

I draped the towel from my head to over my shoulders and examined my fingers. The first layer of skin was pretty well shot, and the next was pink and sensitive. My ear hurt, and I hadn’t taken the bandage off for fear of disturbing it, but mostly I felt good, being clean for the first time in a couple of days. “Why didn’t you just ring for a nurse?”

“I tried.”

I thought about going back in the shower and drowning myself. “Where did you see him last?”

“In his room, about five minutes ago.”

I handed him the portable radio, still amazingly clipped to the back of my mud-encrusted Carhartts. “This building is not that big. Have somebody go stand at the northeast corner of the hospital, and you stand at the southwest; either of you spots him leaving, call in. You use your truck radio.” I looked up at Ferg and thought about how he had worked through the better part of the night, probably hadn’t had anything decent to eat in days, and more than likely needed to phone his wife and let her know he was still alive. Donna worked at an insurance firm in town and, after thirty years of marriage, they were still madly in love. On Sunday afternoons, you could see them walking, holding hands, along Clear Creek in the park. “He got away from me, too, don’t feel bad.” I picked up my hat to keep him from feeling self-conscious. “I think I need a new hat. What do you think?”

He looked at me with hazel eyes not too disturbed by self-analysis and struck out for the southwest corner of the building. “Definitely.”

I sat the hat back down on the polished surface of the wooden bench, which was anchored to the floor with three-inch pipe. I guess the administrators figured the doctors and nurses weren’t making enough money and might try to run off with the furnishings. I looked in the bag at my new clothes with a sense of trepidation. If she was angry when she bought them for me, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see what size they were, but the jeans were an exact fit, as were the jacket, shirt, socks, underwear, and undershirt.

After I finished dressing, I put my gun belt on, carefully adjusting the jacket so that it covered the majority of it. Then I stuffed my dirty clothes into the bag for later washing or burning, placed my hat on top, and carried it with me into the hallway. Friday, midmorning, and there still wasn’t much traffic at the hospital, which meant that George would have less cover. But, even though the building was small and the staff sparse, there were probably hundreds of places where he could be. I decided to drop my clothes off in Henry’s room, if he was between female visitations, and use it as a base of operations for the hunt for George Esper, take two.

When I got to Henry’s door, I paused to listen and hear if anybody else was in there. I heard voices but, whatever they were saying, it wasn’t postcoital, so I pushed open the door and found George Esper seated in a chair beside Henry. I walked up to the bed opposite George and noticed that he had been crying. “Did it occur to you to say something to my deputy before you went wandering off, George?” He looked sufficiently sheepish and wiped the tears on his bare arm. “I mean, before I put out an all-points bulletin and file a missing persons with the FBI?”

“Thsorry . . .”

“George, here’s the way it works from now on. When I put you someplace, anyplace? I want you to stay there until I come and get you. Do you understand that?” He nodded. “Good, now go back to your room.” He got up and limped toward the door, but before he could get it open I called out, “And stay there.” I listened as the door closed behind him.

“I think George might be a little confused.”

I looked down at him. “Really. I think George is a lot confused.”

“I am serious. I think something might be wrong with him.”

“Other than continual flight syndrome?”

Henry paused for a moment, then folded the sheet down and smoothed the edge. His hands looked strange in this setting, like wild birds accidentally indoors. “Does the family have any history of mental illness?”

“Not that I know of.”

He shook his head. “He seems scattered, and he has no attention span.”

“Concussed?”

“Possibly.” He looked at the empty chair where George had sat. “He wanted to know what he had to do if he wanted to live on the reservation. He thought he might be safer there.”

“That’s confused. He wasn’t that bad on the mountain.” We thought that one over for a moment.

His eyes stayed steady on mine. “He knows about his brother.”

I felt like sitting down. “What did he say? How does he know?”

He shrugged. “It was not anything he said, it was just a feeling. But he knows.”

I studied the polished railing at the side of the bed. “Do you think he was with Jacob when he was killed?”

“I do not know that.” Henry smiled. “I am sorry to be so little help to you, but it is just a feeling. They are twins.”

I leaned against the foot rail and peeled a small piece of the skin from the side of my hand. “How are you feeling?”

“Very well, and yourself ?”

“My hands are falling off and my ear hurts.”

He nodded. “Things could be worse, your ear could fall off.”

“There’s an intraoffice pool; odds are the doctor is going to cut it off.”

“That would be a shame. Your ears are one of your finest features.”

I looked out the window with him. “My thought exactly. They’re gonna get a fight when they come for it.”

He smiled and nodded. “Put me down a fifty on keeping the ear.”

“You’re up against Lucian.”

He continued to look out the window. “He is still calling me Ladies Wear?”

“Yep.”

“Make it a hundred.”

I laughed. “Well, I better call off the manhunt and go talk to George.” I looked down at him again. He really was recuperating quite well and looked as though he could get up and follow me out. “How’s Dena Many Camps doing these days?”

“She is a wonderful and caring young woman.”

I paused at the door. “I don’t suppose George mentioned what room he was in?”

“No.” He still looked out the window, and I wondered how long they would be able to keep him. “He was probably afraid I would come looking for him.”

 

I watched him for a moment longer and then went out into the hall. Doctors and nurses are human, and humans are creatures of habit, so I walked across the hallway and pushed open the door of my old room. George was sitting at the side of his bed, looking out the window at the parking lot. “Hey, George. Mind if I come in?” He didn’t say anything but kept staring out the window. The snow swept across the asphalt surface, piling up wherever the concrete partitions divided the lot. Nobody wanted to be here, and everybody was looking out the windows. I pulled a chair from the wall and sat down in his line of sight. I turned my head and also looked out the window. “Well, I’m glad to be inside, how about you?” He nodded but continued to look at the lot. I could see the Bullet from here; he was probably trying to figure out how to hot-wire it. “I’d say winter is here . . . George?” He finally turned his face toward me. I studied him carefully and noticed he was shaking. “George, are you all right?”

“Chjakeb’s ded.”

I could feel my eyes sharpen as I looked at the young man. “What makes you think that, George?”

“Thsaw himb.” His lips moved, but no more words came out.

“You saw him?” He nodded his head. “Saw him where, George?”

“Othwe montan . . .”

“You saw him up at Dull Knife Lake?” He shook his head as violently as his bandaged jaw would allow. “Where then?” The tremors continued to wrack his body as his naked legs hung from the bed and shook, the nearest thigh wrapped up in a winding layer of gauze. I wasn’t sure if they had him on anything, but with the head injury it was unlikely. “George, if you know anything? I need you to tell me about it. I’m trying to stop who’s doing this, but I have to figure out who it is before I can do anything.”

“Yhew kan’tsopthm.”

I nodded. “Stop who, George?”

I watched as a finger crept from his hand and pointed toward the window. “Tthemb.”

I felt a continuous charge run up my spine as I turned my head and looked out the window again, my reflected image only inches from my eyes. There was a minivan parked a little farther out, but I could almost swear that George Esper was pointing at my truck. “George, there’s nothing out there but my truck.” He continued to look, but the finger disappeared into his fist. I checked again and looked out to the municipal golf course. Maybe Arnie’s Army was after George. “George, who did you see up there?”

The only thing he said was, “Yhew kan’tsopthm.”

I stood up slowly and gently lowered the Venetian blinds with the cord that had been at my back. George still didn’t move, so I pushed him back in the bed with a hand on his shoulder and pulled the blanket and sheet up to his chin. He still shook as if he were freezing. “Why don’t you try and get some sleep?”

“Yhew kan’tsopthm.”

I looked down at another human wreck and patted his chest. “Well . . . I might just surprise you.”

I made my way through the automatic doors of the emergency room and waved at Ferg, who joined me. We used one of the blond brick walls as a wind block and stood against the building’s entrance. “He’s back in his room. I found him in Henry’s, but he’s back in his.” The air was more than a little brisk, so I flipped the collar up on my new jacket and pushed my hands farther into the pockets. “He’s acting a little strange, so you might want to keep an even closer eye on him. I don’t think he’s dangerous, but he might wander off again.”

“You bet.”

“I notified them at the desk. I’m going to head back over to the office and get things sorted out.”

“You bet.”

I was also willing to bet that Ferg would be sitting on George within the moment. I pulled my keys out, headed over to the Bullet, and looked through the window. I’m not sure what it was I expected to see, an entire Old Cheyenne war party riding shotgun or what. I stood there in the wind, the blowing snow peppering the side of my face with its sting, as I looked into my truck. The rifle was there, a palpable reminder of things I could not see and, beside it, sat a black-and-white box of ammunition for things I could. Vic must have left the box after the tests, a little joke, or maybe she thought I might need it. I wondered mildly what had happened to the Weatherby I had on the mountain or to the Remington that Henry had been carrying.

Was anybody in there? Ever since the mountain, I was careful to look for them out of the corners of my eyes. It seemed as though, if I stood there long enough, they would begin to appear, sitting easily on the leather seats and looking back at me with their hair-bone chokers, their trade cloth tied in their hair, and their closed-mouth smiles. They held the rifle in their laps, waiting for me to get in so they could hand it to me. I leaned against the door and closed my eyes; the glass was cold, but I could think again. I opened my eyes, and they were gone. I stood there for another moment, and I’m not sure if I was making sure they were gone or hoping they would reappear. I turned the key, opened the door, and slid in next to the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead. My hand shook a little as I slid the rifle over and placed the box of ammunition on the seat next to me. The box looked old, as if the edges had been roughed off and the printing had been done by an antiquainted press. The date on the box even read 1876. It felt heavy, and I thought about pumpkins.